The first-year core curriculum is a hallmark of the Tuck academic experience and essential to our mission of educating wise leaders to better the world of business.
Courses are carefully integrated and complement each other. In some cases, students with an extensive background in a particular discipline may receive an exemption from one of the core courses and take an elective course in its place.
Faculty: Raghav Singal, Robert A Shumsky
Subject Areas: Marketing, Operations and Management Science
The two-course sequence in Analytics introduces methods for modeling decision problems, understanding data, and using models and data to make wise decisions. Analytics 1 begins by studying probability and decision-making under uncertainty. We then discuss spreadsheet modeling and optimization. We illustrate these analytic methods in a variety of managerial settings (including marketing, operations, and finance) and in a variety of industries. The course will emphasize hands-on experience with Excel, with Excel add-ins, and will discuss the role of AI tools such as ChatGPT in these contexts.
Faculty: Leslie A Robinson, Phillip C Stocken
Subject Areas: Accounting
This course develops the basic concepts and procedures underlying corporate financial statements and introduces tools for analyzing profitability and risk. We explore the impact of the alternative policies and procedures available within generally accepted accounting principles on financial statements, especially in terms of management's financial reporting strategy.
Faculty: Amy E Florentino, Courtney H Pierson
Subject Areas: Communication
Management Communication is designed to provide Tuck students with immediately applicable skills for professional communication. You will complete the course with an understanding of and demonstrated improvements in overall communication, delivery and presentation skills. In addition, you will learn and practice effective techniques for delivering feedback. This mini course is offered in Fall A to allow you to immediately apply your ManComm skills – during winter recruiting, your FYP and summer internship.
Faculty: Anais Galdin, Joseph M Hall
Subject Areas: Economics
This course applies the ideas and methodology of economics to analysis of the firm, key decisions within the firm, and the industry. Topics covered include costs, pricing, competition, economic efficiency, and industry equilibrium and change. Particular attention is paid to behavior of the firm and industries when uncertainty and transaction costs exist. The course combines lectures/discussions of principles, with cases covering both current and classic firm and industry dilemmas. Issues of public policy, especially regarding pollution, are also covered.
Faculty: Daniel C Feiler, Tianna S Barnes
Subject Areas: Organizational Behavior
This course will provide students with conceptual frameworks for increasing individual and team performance. Topics include: managing individual motivation, dealing with interpersonal relations, individual and group decision-making, designing and structuring teams, managing team dynamics, and how to build and leverage social networks.
Faculty: Sydney Finkelstein
Tuck Launch is a required two-week program designed to jump-start your personal and professional growth while introducing you to life at Tuck. It accelerates your immersion into business school through experiential learning, integrated programming, and guided reflection. The program intentionally combines curricular, co-curricular, and career components—the same blend that defines the overall Tuck experience. From day one, Tuck Launch lays the foundation for your class community and lifelong network.
Faculty: Praveen K Kopalle
Subject Areas: Marketing, Operations and Management Science
The objective of Analytics 2 is to provide you with a strong background in analytics and machine learning, which is the engine behind AI. We will emphasize learning how to be an intelligent "consumer" of analytics. This, in turn, will help you make effective decisions as a manager using machine learning and AI. We will use sophisticated statistical and machine learning analytics methods to understand and anticipate the effects of our actions. These methods include confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, A/B testing, multiple regression, and supervised and unsupervised machine learning models such as neural networks and cluster analysis. We will apply these methods to problems from all organizational functions including management & strategy, operations, economics, marketing, finance & accounting, and to a variety of industries. In addition, you will become skilled in performing various analyses via hands-on experience using Radiant, based on R/R-Studio programming language.
Faculty: Franz J Hinzen, Joseph J Gerakos
Subject Areas: Finance
This course provides a detailed overview of the world’s debt, equity, and derivatives markets. We start with the fundamentals of how the markets function and then move on to more advanced topics such as the determinants of interest rates, the trade-off between risk and return, the behavior of stock prices, and the pricing and uses of futures and options contracts. We illustrate how and why capital markets are important to investors and managers using real-world problems.
Faculty: Tami Kim, Elizabeth A Keenan
Subject Areas: Marketing
The marketing course prepares managers to understand the strategic role of marketing and how to apply it in their organizations. The course teaches how to grow a business by thoroughly understanding its current and prospective customers, the only source of a firm’s revenue. Companies with high or increasing market capitalizations know how to create, communicate, and deliver value to their customers. Students will learn how to create such value by applying a set of frameworks and analytical tools in three areas: identifying market opportunities, setting a marketing strategy, and formulating the marketing mix. Case studies and practical applications are used to develop experience in implementing these frameworks and analytical tools in order to grow a business. Specific course topics include market research, consumer decision making, market segmentation, targeting, positioning, branding, product development, advertising, pricing, distribution, marketing across borders, and marketing for a better world.
Faculty: Giovanni Gavetti, Jose R Lecuona Torras
Subject Areas: Strategy
This course offers the “essential” tool-kit of the executive involved in the strategy process—the key ideas, concepts, and tools that are necessary to properly exercise strategic leadership. The course is divided into two parts. The first focuses on the strategy problem at the business unit level. It is at the business unit level that many key strategic choices and actions are formulated and undertaken. This part of the course starts by proposing a vocabulary and an analytical structure that help define competitive advantage precisely. It then tackles the question of how a strategic leader can locate opportunities to achieve sustained competitive advantage. This part of the course concludes with a discussion of why strategic leaders should be not only competent “practitioner economists”––the ability to read market forces is the traditional focus of competitive strategy analysis and tools––but also competent “practitioner psychologists,” and what developing such competence entails. The second part of the course focuses on the challenge of managing multiple business units. In particular, it focuses on how a strategic leader can determine the ideal horizontal and vertical scope for her firm and what that implies for mergers, acquisitions, and various typologies of alliances. Students take the first half of the Strategy course in the fall term, and the second half in the spring.
Faculty: Felipe Severino, Katarzyna A Lewellen
Subject Areas: Finance
This course discusses basic principles of corporate finance and provides practical tools for financial decisions and valuation. The course consists of five sections. The first, Capital Budgeting Decisions, shows optimal project acceptance criteria consistent with the objective of maximizing the market value of the firm. The second section, Estimating the Cost of Capital, extends the analysis from the Capital Markets course to the practice of estimating a project's expected return. The third section, Valuation Techniques, develops several valuation methods used in practice, including WACC, APV, multiples, and real options. Part four, Capital Structure and Dividend Policies, involves a discussion of how capital structure and dividend decisions affect firm value and survey industry practice. Part five of the course, Investment Banking, develops key principles and practices for raising capital, mergers and acquisitions, and modern restructuring techniques.
Faculty: Emily J Blanchard, Han Ping Davin Chor
Subject Areas: Economics
Global Economics for Managers will expand your knowledge of economics in two directions. First, expansion of the scope of inquiry covers the economics of the nation in a global economy. This portion of the course will cover international economics and macroeconomics. The focus of study will be on the larger economic forces that shape production, trade flows, capital flows, interest rates, exchange rates, and other variables that create the global economic landscape. The second direction is international microeconomics which will apply the tools of microeconomics and international economics to illustrate how globalization influences performance, strategy, and policy within firms. The ultimate objective is to help students develop a framework for analyzing both opportunities and risks in a global economic environment.
Faculty: Trip Davis, Andy Kaestle, Lindsay N Hyde, William C Martin, Kirsten H Detrick, Richard J McNulty, Courtney H Pierson, Rebecca Rice-Mesec, Deirdre C O'Donnell, Daniella L Reichstetter
Subject Areas: Entrepreneurship, Experiential
The First-Year Project (FYP) course challenges teams of five students to apply classroom learning, and utilize skills from their prior work experience, to solve complex business challenges for real clients, or for their own entrepreneurial endeavor. This experiential learning class is unique in that it allows individual students the opportunity to tailor the curriculum to their own interests and career goals. Under the guidelines of the course, students can source their own project or select a project from the project portfolio and, for all projects, form a diverse team for their project of choice. Projects come from all industries; are local, national, and global; are for non- and for-profit organizations; are with companies at all levels of business development, from early-stage to Fortune 100. Past project teams have analyzed new businesses, created launch strategies for new product or service offerings from an existing company, developed marketing strategies and implementation plans, and assessed the market potential for expansion into entirely new markets.
Faculty: Adam M Kleinbaum
Subject Areas: Organizational Behavior
Organizations are complex social systems that blend practices, culture, structures, processes, and people in order to achieve certain strategic goals. This course helps students better understand the principles and frameworks to develop and adapt organizations so that they can deliver on these goals. We examine key organizational decisions such as how to structure and design an organization; how to develop a high-performance organizational culture, how to attract and retain key talent needed in the organization, and how to build informal power without fostering resistance, including managing with empathy and credibility. We address these topics by engaging in case studies and experiential approaches, such as simulations and role plays, as well as discuss contemporary organizational challenges.
Faculty: Joseph M Hall, Brian T Tomlin, Laurens G Debo
Subject Areas: Operations and Management Science
Operations Management is the systematic design, management and control of the resources and processes that transform inputs into finished goods or services. This course provides an introduction to the concepts and analytic methods that are useful in understanding the management of a firm's operations; both in service and manufacturing settings. The level of analysis varies considerably, from operations strategy through to daily execution, and from single locations through to global supply chains.
Faculty: Giovanni Gavetti, Jose R Lecuona Torras
Subject Areas: Strategy
This course offers the “essential” tool-kit of the executive involved in the strategy process—the key ideas, concepts, and tools that are necessary to properly exercise strategic leadership. The course is divided into two parts. The first focuses on the strategy problem at the business unit level. It is at the business unit level that many key strategic choices and actions are formulated and undertaken. This part of the course starts by proposing a vocabulary and an analytical structure that help define competitive advantage precisely. It then tackles the question of how a strategic leader can locate opportunities to achieve sustained competitive advantage. This part of the course concludes with a discussion of why strategic leaders should be not only competent “practitioner economists”––the ability to read market forces is the traditional focus of competitive strategy analysis and tools––but also competent “practitioner psychologists,” and what developing such competence entails. The second part of the course focuses on the challenge of managing multiple business units. In particular, it focuses on how a strategic leader can determine the ideal horizontal and vertical scope for her firm and what that implies for mergers, acquisitions, and various typologies of alliances. Students take the first half of the Strategy course in the fall term, and the second half in the spring.